


fragmentation

by writerdragonfly



Series: [crystal verse] [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Children, Family Secrets, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Original Character Death(s), Reproductive Issues, Twins, outside pov, pre-kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 21:44:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7950259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdragonfly/pseuds/writerdragonfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there was one thing in the world that Jenna never doubted, it was that John would do anything to make her happy. No matter what.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fragmentation

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few months ago and didn't realize I had finished the piece? So, have some fic.
> 
> There _will be_ a sequel. I actually started that fic before this one, and it's currently at 6k+?
> 
> (This also contains a brief cameo by Harvey Specter because I do what I want.)

When Jenna is thirteen years old, she kisses Garrett Harrison in the back of the horse stalls. He's startled, but receptive. They do things in secret (he's the youngest son of the stable master and she's a Sheppard), for nearly two months before they're caught.

 

Jenna gets a stern talking to and Garrett gets banned from the property.

 

It's the first time Jenna was ever pissed off with her father on her own behalf.

 

-x-

 

By the time Jenna is fifteen, she's slept with four different guys and John's study partner Laura.

 

And then she meets Jim.

 

His full name is James Mulroney and he's even farther removed from what their father would approve of and that's half the excitement for her. He's eighteen and in college, burdened by student loans and debt.

 

She runs into him by accident but falls for him fast and hard.

 

When she's sixteen (barely) she finds out she's pregnant and her whole world feels like it's falling apart.

 

She tells Jim, and he laughs and says, "not my problem."

 

He's moved out of his apartment and completely disappeared a day later and Jenna doesn't know what to do.

 

Things haven't been the same for her and John since she started dating, she knows this.

 

But she also knows this: John is her best friend and her brother, the twin of herself and the one person who has never, ever, let her down.

 

Jim has been gone three days and she's pregnant and the rebellion against her father feels like a stupid mistake in light of this one. 

 

She sneaks into John's room by creeping across the roof, because John is grounded (for the glossy Air Force pamphlets he'd gotten from career day, while she only ever got a frown and implied threat).

 

She wakes her brother even though it's late, because she's scared and afraid (and alone) and pregnant and she doesn't know what to do.

 

He holds her there, kisses her forehead and rubs circles across her back and she sobs into his chest because it's too much (everything is too much.)

 

-x-

 

When they're leaving school the next afternoon, before they've picked up Dave from his school and long before they're home, John pulls to the side of the road and hands her a handful of pamphlets.

 

Abortion, adoption, teenage pregnancy, the whole works.

 

"Whatever you need, I'm here," he says, and Jenna knows he means it.

 

-x-

 

Making a choice about it isn't like choosing dinner. Jenna thinks about it for more than a week before John says, “ we could run away.”

 

“And do what, Johnny?”

 

“You can have the baby, and I’ll take it and we can pretend I got some girl pregnant--”

 

“And what? What kind of life would that be?”

 

-x-

 

John drives her to the free clinic in the city, sits patiently at her side while she talks to doctors and nurses and aides, waits and soaks in and listens.

 

Jenna isn’t as afraid with him there.

 

-x-

 

“With your family history, it’s likely that the pregnancy may cause...”

 

-x-

 

“I don’t want to die, Johnny,” she whispers in the car on the long drive back, “I don’t want...”

 

“You won’t,” John promises, “As long as I’m here, I won’t let you.”

 

-x-

 

Three days later, her brother isn’t looking at her directly, but he’s there. He’s there at her side, squeezing her fingers, telling her that it’s okay, that everything will be all right, that he loves her.

 

He’s there before and after and during, and it makes it easier.

 

-x-

 

He’s not really the same afterward, though. He’s still her brother, her twin. He still loves her and protects her.

 

But she knows what her decision did to him, even if she’s not sure why it hurt him so much.

 

-x-

 

John and their father fight, more and more often after that. John is slipping away from her, from them.

 

She’s not sure how to get him back, if she _can_ get him back.

 

-x-

 

John graduates a year early. John graduates a year early and Jenna hadn’t even known he was going to. It hurts. It hurts _so much_ and it’s so hard and she doesn’t know how to fix things.

 

-x-

 

John goes off to college, and she’s lucky if she can get him on the phone for more than five minutes. He doesn’t come home for his breaks.

 

Their father cuts him off in an attempt to get him to at least come for Christmas, and John just gets a job and has a built-in excuse not to come.

 

-x-

 

John joins the Air Force and when he talks to her on the phone, he sounds happy and at ease.

 

-x-

 

“Hi,” the woman says with a soft smile, “I’m Nancy.”

 

And Jenna meets his brother’s _wife_ for the first time. She’s beautiful and nice and smart, and she’s exactly the type of woman she expected her brother to find.

 

Except...

 

Except John is careful with his touches and his feather light kisses. He’s constrained and gentle, but not passionate.

 

She doesn’t think her brother is in love with his wife, but Jenna can tell that he wants to be. That he’s trying.

 

So she smiles and says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nancy.”

 

And it is.

 

-x-

 

Six months later, there’s a fight and Jenna calls him out and Jenna says, “you need to come home already,” and John says, “this isn’t home,” and their father says, “you’re a disappointment.”

 

And John says, “I’m never going to be anything but a disappointment to you am I?"

 

And their father says, “At least Jenna never did anything as stupid as you.”

 

And Jenna thinks John’s going to say, “Jenna had an abortion when we were sixteen,” but instead he says, “Jenna’s not gay, so in your book I guess she will never be as much of a disappointment as I am. ”

 

-x-

 

She doesn’t see John in person after that.

 

-x-

 

She sees Nancy though. Even after the divorce, she sees Nancy.

 

-x-

 

He calls her three times a year, their birthday and their mom’s birthday and Christmas.

 

He sends her postcards. She knows some he must be picking up while travelling the world for the USAF, but most are pulled directly from his collection, the one he’d started when they were six years old and on vacation.

 

The one she used to help him slide into plastic protectors to keep away the dust.

 

-x-

 

Jenna dates and falls in love and has her heart broken and breaks hearts. She knows her father is waiting for her to get married, but it never feels like the right time or the right guy.

 

After another breakup, she realizes she’s tired of waiting and if there’s one thing she knows, it’s that she doesn’t need anyone else to have a baby.

 

She researches and visits and interviews, and she finds the best she can.

 

And then she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant and happy and excited and she wants to tell John, except...

 

Except she finally gets it, why it affected him so much when it was her body and her choice.

 

Because John must’ve known back then that he was gay, that he would never be a father. Jenna had given him the glimmer of a chance, and then she took it away.

 

She doesn’t tell John.

 

And months later, when her due date is growing closer and she feels worse and worse and remembers what her first doctor had told her and her current one had warned her and she knows.

 

She knows that she might not make it, that her child ( _daughter)_ might never know her.

 

And she knows that John would give up his career in an instant to raise his niece but she doesn’t want that.

 

John doesn’t deserve to lose the one thing that’s made him truly happy in years to take care of the baby.

 

A baby he might resent because of what had happened years before.

 

So she doesn’t tell him, and when she talks with their father, she makes sure he doesn’t let John know either.

 

Their father doesn’t understand and Jenna can’t explain, but he promises anyway.

 

She knows they’re both hoping it’s a pointless promise.

 

-x-

 

Jenna signs all the paperwork that her lawyer had drafted up, all the wills and contingencies and _everything_ that the lawyers and her father and the courts might need.

 

She signs everything, and then she settles herself in her bedroom a few hours before she’s due to report to the hospital for her checkup.

 

She settles in and records a video and her heart breaks all over again for what she’s done and what she’s doing and how much she knows it’s going to hurt John.

 

(How much she knows it’s _already_ hurt him.)

 

-x-

 

She goes to her check-up and never does leave the hospital afterward.

 

Gaia Johanna Sheppard is born three weeks later, and Jenna holds her for _just a **few minutes**_ before she codes.

 

-x-

 

Gaia grows up listening to her grandfather telling her stories about knights who can fly and wild little princesses who do what they want and second-born princes who take charge of their kingdoms and do it well.

 

She grows up taking advanced level classes and blowing her classmates out of the water, ends up in specialty boarding schools because there just isn’t enough in her public school for her to learn.

 

She comes home almost every weekend to the singular attention of her grandfather and the house-staff and she loves them all fiercely.

 

She’s eight when her grandfather has a heart attack, but it’s okay because he lives.

 

But then she’s afraid of losing him, of being shuffled off to her uncle who berates her grandfather for letting her choose her own life and who yells at him for telling her that it’s okay to want to fly, of letting go of the single most important person in her life.

 

She knows it’s inevitable. Her mother is dead, after all.

 

Gaia tells him one night that if he dies, she doesn’t want to go live with Uncle Dave unless she has to. And it’s not that she doesn’t love him (because she does, even though it’s not the same _kind_ of love) but because she doesn’t think she can be the kind of kid that Dave wants her to be.

 

“I want to fly, Grandpa,” she says, a wistful smile on her face.

 

And her grandfather looks away for a minute but when he turns back he says, “Anything you want, Princess.”

 

-x-

 

She’s home when he has the heart attack that kills him, doing her homework in the study with him. She’s quick to call the ambulance, but even before it gets there, she knows it’s too late.

 

-x-

 

She doesn’t go to the wake and it bothers her, but she’s ten years old and not an adult.

 

-x-

 

Mr. Specter had been her grandfather’s lawyer for as long as she could remember. It wasn’t just him, of course, and technically it was Ms. Pearson who handled the bulk of her grandfather’s needs, but Mr. Specter had always been there for the parts that included her.

 

She thinks, sometimes, that maybe she was the only reason that Mr. Specter was ever there.

 

He never treated her like she was a toddler, but always like a person. A fully formed person with an expansive mind locked in the body of a kid.

 

As she’s packing her bag to head back to school, his sits on the corner of her bed and says, “are you sure you want to meet him?”

 

“If he’s not a good man, you’ll find out, won’t you?”

 

“Of course. We’ll know everything about him long before we bring you near him.”

 

“Then I don’t need to worry, right?”

 

And she doesn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find [me on tumblr.](http://writerdragonfly.tumblr.com)
> 
> Comments, questions, etc., are welcome at any time.


End file.
